10 Reasons You Need To Use WordPress For Your Website

WordPress launched in 2003 and now powers a fifth of the websites on the Internet, which makes it the most popular content management system (CMS) out there. While it started life as being merely “blog software,” it is now a versatile all-purpose publishing tool.

Whether you are an experienced web developer or are making plans to launch your first website, WordPress offers a number of important benefits. Here are 10 of them:

1. It is Open Source Software

This means that it costs you nothing to use. It is free to download, install and use as you like. WordPress only costs you money if you hire a web developer to create a custom theme or custom features for your website. With WordPress, you get a product coded by thousands of developers from around the world who are constantly working to make it a better product. You get to benefit from their work without having to pay a penny for it. This immense talent pool behind the product is one of its biggest assets.

2. Creating and Editing Your Own Content is Easy

One of the many reasons that WordPress is a popular as it is has to do with its user-friendliness. WordPress is both easy to use and easy to learn, even for beginners. As a non-technical person, you can edit the content on your website without having to pay a webmaster to do it. Gone are the days when you needed coding skills to make major changes. If you can use a Word or any standard word processing software, you can use WordPress. You can add, alter or remove content via your computer or even from your smartphone.
WordPress handles many of the behind-the-scenes tasks that go into running a website. It will automatically generate your navigation links, index your content and make it all searchable. It will also help you to manage your users, which is one of the more challenging tasks that webmasters face. WordPress can handle a large number of user management tasks automatically, including keeping track of your users’ permissions and security settings.

3. It Offers a Wide Array of Functions

Along with basic features like blogging and commenting, WordPress provides you with host of functions via its many plugins. Plugins are extensions that deliver additional functionality. The fact that WordPress is as popular as it is has resulted in developers creating numerous plugins for it. You will be able to create video galleries and slideshows among many other forms of content. Other popular plugins can help you to use your WordPress site for ecommerce or give you a better look at your traffic. In most cases, WordPress plugins can be installed in three clicks.

4. SEO Purpose – Highly Optimized for Search Engine

Every website owner should keep SEO in mind when looking for a content management system. Right out of the box, WordPress offers a number of options that can help you to get to the top of the search engine results. Search engines like Google have a preference for WordPress due to its logical architecture and responsive design. Its code is clean and simple so that search engine spiders will have no issues when trying to crawl your site. Each page and each blog post can be given its own meta tag keyword which allows for even more precise SEO. If you have no idea how to use meta tags there are various plugins available that can handle them for you.

5. It is Flexible & Tons of Plugin

As noted in the introduction, WordPress started life as a blogging platform but has evolved into so much more. As a full-featured CMS, WordPress is used on over 75 million websites around the world. The sites vary broadly in their function and range from social media websites to sites for business and news. With the right plugin, you can even use WordPress to build a fully functioning directory website among many other options. Because there are so many sites using them, many of the more popular and thoroughly tested plugins are completely free.

6. There Are Numerous (Free) Resources

If you want to learn enough to be considered a WordPress Expert, you have thousands of blogs with tutorials and guides at your disposal. Whether you are a beginner or have extensive coding knowledge, there are forums and other resources that you can use to find help such as answers to any questions you might have.

You can also check Firstsiteguide which is a great example of website for free WordPress resource.

7. High Security

At first glance, the fact that WordPress is open source may seem to make it more vulnerable to hackers since they have access to the code. However, the reverse is true. The reality is that you have a large security team that is constantly working to make your website more secure. The result is that your blog is less vulnerable to hackers than it would be if you were using a proprietary CMS.

8. Truly Customizable Appearance

WordPress allows you to give your website exactly the look you want. There is a theme for just about every look, whether you want your site to look like a magazine or are building an eCommerce site. In addition, you can customize the themes with your own colors and images as many of them have their own control panel. You can change your background, fonts and colors without doing any coding.

9. Multiple Media Types Support

WordPress allows you to have a wider range of content types than just text. You can post your audio, video or any other type of media since WordPress has built in support for many different file types. It also supports YouTube, Twitter and other websites that allow you to embed content. You can even allow your visitors to post videos in their comments.

10. It is a Universal Platform

What happens with a standard website if you part company with your developer? In most cases, you will have to start from scratch with a new developer. This can be costly and time consuming. However, with a universal platform like WordPress, your new developer should be able to start up where the old one left off without too much trouble. In fact, anyone with a basic understanding of PHP and MySQL will be able to start work on your WordPress website project even at short notice.